“... hostile analyses, say, of Milton or Shelley, to reinforce Leavis’s right to be called a major critic. To paraphrase Johnson’s remark on Gray and his ‘Elegy’, had he always written like this, it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him. Critical commentary of this kind usually had its origin in the classroom. It was essential to ...”

“... for the author to provide something more than a lesson in how to suck eggs. Stephen Gilbert and John Cook (along with just about everyone else) would agree that Potter reached his reflexive nadir with Blackeyes, in which the story of the eponymous model based on the central character, Jessica, is related as a novel authored by Jessica’s uncle, but ...”

“... term, ‘natural kind’, which has been in use for well over a century. It is derived from John Stuart Mill and William Whewell, who both wrote of ‘kinds’, although the Cambridge logician John Venn may have been the first to use it in a work of philosophy. The term was intended to get rid of a lot of ...”

“... merely pretending. Much of this ‘renewal’ had, of course, been achieved by Neil Kinnock and John Smith, while the numerical and political decline of the unions, together with a change in the composition of the electorate and the Labour Party’s membership, made ‘renewal’ much easier and, at least to some extent, necessary. Nevertheless, Mr Blair ...”

“... the taxi-driver – who else? – of the death of the American Ambassador. It was August 1968, and John Gordon Mein had been assassinated that morning. This was an abrupt introduction to the complexities of Guatemalan politics, and I merely assumed – with the Vietnam War and the less-publicised Guatemalan guerrilla war of the Sixties well underway – that ...”

“... aristo to his friends in the pop music world, but his nobbier chums looked down on him a bit. John Richardson says: One of the odd things about Robert was that he always dressed up. The rest of us were in blue jeans and leather jackets and up to no good in the Village, but Robert always had an impeccable blazer, very Old Etonian, consciously so. I ...”

“... crowded in and eventually filled every corner of the hall. Dore Gold was the first speaker. ‘John Negroponte,’ he began, ‘US director of national intelligence, said a week ago that in the Middle East, Iran and its neighbours see a strategic move. The influence of Iran is rising beyond its nuclear programme. The fall of the Taliban and Saddam ...”

“... San was chiefly the work of the Dutch, and some British historians have accepted this view, but John Philip, a hawk-eyed missionary in the 1820s, knew that this wasn’t so. The system ‘which rendered the Dutch name so infamous’, he wrote, is now being carried on ‘in all its horrors’ under the British Government: ‘Impatient to obtain undisturbed ...”

“... behind him, Vertigo on the horizon) and commercially, with the TV show about to launch him as a major celebrity and global brand. It’s not entirely clear what brought the two men together. Smith speculates that Hitchcock considered the humour in The Trouble with Harry to be distinctively English and was drawn to Herrmann (born in New York to Russian and ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... as they are, can’t help not coming up to. The second or critical section is extremely strong: John Gross on the Oxford Book, George Hartley on the early publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and others. But ...”

“... collars noticeably cleaner, but – combined with the decline of heavy industry in the other major polluter, the former USSR – the telltale deposits of sulphate aerosols in Greenland ice cores fell in the 1990s.A British scientist, Professor Michael Grubb of Imperial College, London, first suggested that these two unlikely successes might become the ...”

“... articles that put the hysteria of much of the British press to shame. Not surprisingly, a major concern was with the implications of the referendum result for Denmark, which, having joined the EU at the same time as Britain (and negotiated similar opt-outs), was often billed as that strange animal, a ‘natural ally’. Following the announcement of ...”

“... sources and give them life within her fiction is quite exceptional. The Protestant martyrologist John Foxe relates in sketchy detail, with much acknowledgment that his sources are imperfect, the burning of the Lollard Joan Boughton at Smithfield in 1494. ‘The night following that she was burnt,’ Foxe says, ‘the most part of her ashes were had away of ...”

“... had been assassinated. The world was gearing up for the Great War, but Blast was evidence that a major campaign was already underway, and it advertised its confrontational style with a puce-and-black colour scheme and parallel columns of hates and loves, ‘blasted’ and ‘blessed’. The bombastic birth of Vorticism occurs more than 600 pages into Helen ...”